By Tardsie

The good ones, maybe. But some of them are crap.

I got a good education in college. Mostly, I have my professors to thank for that. Rather than force students to parrot their own beliefs, these learned men and women encouraged me to consider all sides of an issue, to dissect and analyze its components, with context and without, and then arrive at my own opinion. I will be forever in their debt.

But in my checkered five-year college career (in which I managed to earn not one but two useless degrees and a minor in Literature) I did encounter a handful of professors who failed to meet the lofty standards and degree of intellectual rigor to which I’d become accustomed. Let me tell you about three of them.

Professor Jihad–The Anti-American Comparative Politics Professor—I’m a big believer in considering alternative points of view, but Professor Jihad was a bit of a one-trick pony. The only opinion he was willing to countenance was one in which United States (or one of its nefarious Western allies) was responsible for all the world’s ills, from climate change to herpes. I understood pretty early on just how pronounced was his monomania when he found a paper I had written insufficiently excoriating of the West. His red-ink comments dripped with disappointment.

“In a pinch, I’ll also accept virulent anti-Semitism.”

I adapted. I decided to make a game of “writing to my audience” as it were. My papers became rabidly, comically anti-American—no connection to American perfidy and imperialism was too tenuous; no snide, predictable jab at Western cultural values was beneath me. And of course, he ate it up. The guy adored my bullshit, and called on me often in class, giving me the opportunity to indulge my talent for talking convincingly at length about whatever twaddle it was that the prof wanted to hear. Despite this, he never managed to get my first name right and I couldn’t be bothered to correct him.

Ensign Dorkus–The Uptight Nerdy Physics Professor–This guy looked more weaselly than a tall man has any right to. He was probably younger than I am now, but was even then determinedly courting middle-age. His shiny bald skull was ringed by shaggy, mousey hair. He favored sweaters, Dockers and sockless loafers, which made him look less like a preppie than like someone’s uncool dad. He wore thick birth-control glasses and talked about Klingons a lot.

Some people choose virginity. Others have it thrust upon them.

His class was a new offering at my school: a bold, if self-evidently ridiculous and doomed-from-the-outset attempt to rethink the teaching of science: mathless physics. Rather than slog our way through a terrifying forest of equations, formulae and cosines, we would write softball essays on such topics as Is the Space Program Worth the Money? However, it quickly became apparent that Ensign Dorkus graded these essays not on the quality of our arguments, but rather on the specific position we took (in the Space Program question, for example, the correct answer was “yes”).

Just a few weeks into second semester Ensign Dorkus admitted defeat, and made few friends among the students when he reverted to more traditional teaching methods and abruptly reintroduced math to the course. When we complained, he had the gall to explain to us much as he would to an idiot child, “Well, you can’t do physics without math!” He was a bachelor, and likely still is.

Dr. Knob–The Self-Loathing Backup Sociology Instructor–Even sociologists know that sociology isn’t a real academic discipline, but I needed the class to graduate. Dr. Knob wasn’t even the tenured sociology prof; he was a backup brought in at the last minute when the real professor’s class became too full. He was thick-built and beefy, with a docile, bovine face set into a neckless head that was completely hairless except for thick eyebrows and a walrus mustache which seemed somehow to comprise a matched set.

His discomfort with his own whiteness was palpable. He was the kind of guy who pronounces the names of Latin American countries—but only those countries—exactly how a native speaker would pronounce them in either Spanish or Portuguese—“HWHAT-ah-mal-ah,” “MEH-hee-ko,” “ar-yen-TEE-nah,” “EH-hwhah-dor.”

“And I’m so, so sorry…”

He was particularly eager to ingratiate himself with the Latino students. He would sometimes pose questions to the class. When a Asian, white or African-American would answer, he had a habit of greeting their answers with a polite, but puzzled skepticism, as if what they were saying didn’t quite make sense. Then, when a Latino student would provide essentially the same answer (which was now correct), he would smile paternally at the foolish non-Latino student as if to say, “See, I’m teaching you.”

He’d show films about the plight of migrants in America every couple of weeks, and we’d take those opportunities to sneak out of class. He never noticed. He never discussed the texts he’d assigned for class and which I never bothered to buy. Instead, he’d send us on crap errands to places like the laundromat or the welfare office and ask us to “journal” our experiences. I didn’t waste my time going to those places, and instead wrote lively fictionalized accounts, peopled by an insane menagerie of twisted addicts, determined, self-sufficient single moms and grim predators. It was good enough to earn me a B+, which was the non-Latino equivalent of an A in Dr. Knob’s class.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that none of these gentlemen received tenure.

By Tardsie

It happened just like this.

There were a lot more kids living in my neighborhood back at the time of the Cross-Lot Food Fight than there are today. In those days the town could support two elementary schools, and there wasn’t anywhere you could go within the city limits and not see a youthful face. This story is about young people, kids and young adults, and the delightfully destructive foolishness in which young people so often find themselves engaged.

It started when a flying tomato nearly knocked my neighbor Jason off his bike. A group of maybe six of us were playing in the street in a way kids rarely do these days, just being kids and not really playing at any one thing. Jason yelped as the crimson meteor sailed across his handlebars and dove into the street with a meaty thud. For a moment there was confusion; none of us had seen it coming.

We saw the volley that came next.

Four tomatoes arced through the empty air above an unused lot adjacent to the street, falling around us and striking the asphalt with heavy splats. Hoots of raucous laughter carried from behind the wooden plank fence at the far end of the lot, where because of the lot’s slope, we could see the head and shoulders of about a dozen people, all of them adults and old enough to know better.

War is hell.

The fog of war is deceiving, and there were some things we didn’t know. We believed that first Jason and then the rest of us had been the intended targets of the tomato barrage. We were not. In truth, when the whole thing kicked off, the gaggle of inebriated twenty-somethings had no idea we were even there. It started when first one of the guests, then a small mob, began raiding the yard’s tidy garden for tomatoes to hurl at a rusted-out jeep somebody had parked on the street side of the lot. The resident of the house, a hard-charging hellion named Brett, agreed that this was a fine idea. It didn’t matter, however, that we were never the intended targets; the opening salvo had been launched and we were now at war. We plucked the partially intact tomatoes from the pavement and from amidst the weeds of the lot and returned fire.

The drunken party-posse was throwing at us in earnest now, and we took some hits, but it kept us stocked in ammunition as we advanced on the fence. The barrage came hard, and by the time we reached the fence they’d run out of fresh tomatoes, and we were assailed by pulpy formless fruit that was sometimes just a bloody mess held together by a flap of skin. They plundered the garden’s treasures, and all manner of green and growing thing came sailing over the wooden divide that separated our two camps. One asshole even threw an entire watermelon over that fence; it sailed over the top of the wood for a few feet like some tie-dye zeppelin before plummeting earthward and spilling its guts into the weeds.

There’s no way to dress up hurling a watermelon at a child as anything but a terrible idea.

The only hit I took was as I climbed the fence, but it was a good one and left a bruise. As I came overtop the fence I interrupted a guy in the act of throwing a fairly intact and particularly unripe tomato. He walloped me in the side of the head and down I went. To his credit, my assailant was properly mortified that he’d punched a nine-year-old in the side of the head, and leaned over the fence to make sure I was all right. I gave him a face full of tomato scraps for his trouble.

The fight wound down not long after that. Having gained the yard, we didn’t know what to do with it, and anyway the garden was now just a churned and ravaged patch of earth. Also, just then the police showed up. The nasty old lady who lived next to me had called them, claiming an errant tomato had violated the sanctity of her front lawn. Small town cops can sometimes be the biggest dicks, and it didn’t help that the officer initially believed we’d vandalized a neighborhood garden in the most spectacular way imaginable. He was unkind, and one of my friends walked home crying, his wails trailing him all the way up the street. Fortunately, the drunken adults who had precipitated the messy melee came to our defense, and the affair ended rather anticlimactically.

“…therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Nobody plays in the empty lot any more. There just aren’t as many kids in town these days as when jobs were more plentiful and homes cheaper. My old elementary closed in the late 90s, and my kids go to the school across town. I haven’t spoken to Jason, the kid who nearly got knocked off his bike, in decades, but every now and then I see him in the front yard of his parents’ home and sometimes I’ll wave. I still talk to the kid who went home crying. He’s done well for himself, first as a political consultant here in the States, and now does PR work for various foreign regimes which need a little help refurbishing their public images. Brett, the drunken tosspot who hosted the garden-destroying party is now, predictably, a very successful and well-respected business owner who is rumored to enjoy spending time with his young grandchildren. Likewise, I can only assume that the rest of the fruit-chucking yahoos are now beloved pillars of the community. The old lady who called the cops is, of course, long-dead.

By Tardsie

In which amends cannot be made.

Note: Any comments about my headwear will rightly taken as an insult to my proud cultural heritage and an affront to the land of my fathers. And you should know that, historically, those people don’t take perceived threats well at all.

By Smaktakula

Sometimes, when you mention a grievance or accomplishment, large or small, some would-be-funnyman will pipe up, “Do you want a medal or something?”

Next time this happens, tell him, “You’re goddamn right I want a medal. Let’s have it!”

Then, when he inevitably stumbles in his reply, tell him, “Your problem is that you make promises on which you have no intention of delivering. That makes you a liar and a scoundrel. Good day to you, Sir!”

With Or Without The Medal, You’re Pretty Special Just The Way You Are.

By Tardsie

I Don’t Normally Go For Broken Girls, But Heather Was A Special Kind Of Broken.

I met a girl named Heather once at a party many years ago, back when I was single. High summer had come to Western Washington: long, pleasant days finally ushered into night by an extended twilight. Barbecuing weather. The perfect day for a house party.

Heather was a friend of a friend, and she was lovely. She was brainy and self-assured, funny in that easy way that wasn’t practiced, but was as much a natural component of her makeup as were her eyes, nose, lips or breasts. And she was cool, having mastered the delicate feat of managing to remain feminine while at the same time laughing at crude jokes and dropping the occasional F-Bomb.

I am not one of those guys for whom women go nuts at first sight. I guess I’ve been lucky in love, but all my serious relationships have been with women whom I’d known for a while before we started dating, ladies who were slow to recognize that they were already madly in love with me. Like arsenic, my appeal works stealthily over time, growing in secret until it overwhelms the system’s natural defenses, and the victim ultimately succumbs. But this time, maybe, I got lucky–Heather seemed as into me as I was her–an assessment, I hasten to add, made before alcohol clouded my judgement, rendering all such judgments moot.

Some People Call Me The Rat-Killer Of Love.

We both made our individual rounds at the party, but it was never long before we’d find ourselves together again. Being tipsy only seemed to accentuate Heather’s wit and to embolden this already-bold girl. She was knocking the drinks back pretty fast, but so were a lot of people.

Heather grew increasingly hammered as the evening wore on. At 9:30 she was a funny drunk, flirtatious and playfully argumentative. But by the time 11:30 rolled around, she was a mess–an incoherent, apologetic, stumbling grotesquery. Where she had earlier been outgoing and vivacious, now she was quiet and uncertain, confused. Once, she slipped while descending a short, carpeted staircase, picking herself up at the bottom with a shaky little laugh that had nothing of mirth in it whatsoever.

Heather’s friends seemed to find this behavior funny, and when Heather shattered a beer bottle on the back patio a little after midnight, the ensuing beat of silence was followed closely by raucous laughter. “There goes Heather!” somebody said to more laughs.

I’m Afraid The Appeal Is Lost On Me.

“She’s like this every weekend,” my friend told me, explaining that, during the week, Heather worked a 9 to 5 job which helped to keep her behavior in check, but she really let loose on the weekends. She would spend her Friday and Saturday evenings bombed into incoherence. She suffered through Saturday and Sunday afternoons semi-comatose on her couch, the curtains drawn against the sun’s rays, and against the pain and nausea they brought.

As people made their goodbyes and the party thinned out, the predators began to circle around Heather, drawn to the scent of compromised vulnerability which was coming off her in waves. She was almost the last girl at the party.

One of the vultures, a guy I knew by face, was particularly determined. He’d moved into Heather’s orbit in the hour before the party wound down, halfheartedly attempting clumsy conversational overtures that often as not degenerated into innuendo, all the while moving steadily closer to Heather, his intentions naked on his face. Finally, he was behind her, rubbing her shoulders and murmuring banalities in her ear. He was nervous and twitchy; he smiled too much and he smiled wrong, as if worried some other predator might steal “his” kill out from under him.

True Story: I Ran Into The Creepy Guy Again A Few Years Later. He Tried To Get Me To Invest In A Multi-Level Marketing Scheme.

Abruptly, Heather turned to me and said, “Take me home.” Her face was plaintive; her eyes huge and terrified.

“Okay,” I said, “I can do that.”

The creep’s fingers froze and slowly retracted from their perch on either side of Heather’s neck. His face wore a look of thwarted, impotent shock that made it clear he had misunderstood what Heather wanted of me. She wasn’t asking me to take her home so that I could have sex with her; she just wanted to go home.

Even with her diminished capacity, Heather must have been aware to some degree of the risks involved in placing her safety in the hands of a man she’d only that day met, and how quickly that situation could spiral beyond her control. Apparently, she thought her chances alone in a car with me were better than if she stayed here with her friends, enjoying the attentions of the creep. I flatter myself that Heather chose the way she did because the spark between us I had imagined earlier in the evening when we were both sober had been very real, and that the events of that years-ago evening are properly filed among life’s many great “if only” moments.

In the end, the thing that I’d wanted more than anything just six or seven hours earlier came to pass–I got to take Heather home. She gave me her phone number before she got out of the car, and said I should call her some time. I told her I would, wishing I could stop the lie even as it came tumbling from my lips.

By Tardsie

And Possibly Assault Or In Turn Be Assaulted By.

When I was seventeen I did something that earned me thirty days in Remann Hall, a juvenile detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. It was pretty serious, and I was lucky in the end to just get the thirty days–in an absolute worst-case scenario I might have done twenty years. As it was, this experience nearly prevented me from graduating high school and subsequently starting college that fall. However, as things have a way of doing, everything turned out all right in the end.

The experience was profound: a watershed moment in my life, and I can trace who I am today in part to my days in Remann Hall. I carry them with me still.

After All These Years, I Still Dream About It Sometimes.

I think a lot about the people I met in that place: the broken children–a collection of feral Lost Boys in a cancerous Never-Never Land, with only their dead-end futures on the horizon; and our keepers, the only-slightly-less broken adults who, through a series of poor vocational choices had come at last to serve as essential but interchangeable gears in that remorseless, child-devouring machine.

No, I Told You About THAT In A Different Post. We Won’t Be Rehashing It Here.

There was the small, gray public defender I had for about thirty seconds before my mom scraped up the money for a real lawyer. The PD couldn’t be bothered even to pretend any concern over my fate at the hands of the legal system, but still managed to give me advice which I regard as invaluable to this day. “Don’t tell them anything,” she urged me, “Just keep your mouth shut.”

‘Inaction’ Indeed. You Get What You Pay For, Folks.

One of the guards was a big black dude who had supposedly played a couple of years in the NFL. Everybody called him Brobocop, just not to his face. Brobocop didn’t like anybody, but he took an inexplicable–and obvious–dislike to me. He was invariably a contemptuous ass on those occasions when he would speak to me, and I quickly learned to avoid him to the extent that I could.

Somebody told me that the reason Brobocop had it out for me was that he thought I was a phony. He saw my sunny disposition, good manners and polished diction as a front, merely the affectations of a clever con. For a long time I accepted that explanation. Now that I’m older, and know a little bit more about people, I wonder. I sometimes think that Brobocop knew quite clearly that I didn’t belong there (which is not to say that I didn’t deserve to be there; I most certainly did), and just didn’t care.

It’s White, Sir. My Fat Ass Is White.

The very first kid I met in juvie had the cell across from mine. He was there for molesting his little sister. “I didn’t do it, though,” he said. I told him I was innocent as well. The place was full of liars.

There was only one girl at Remann Hall when I was there, although I think there may be more now. I don’t remember her name, but I remember that she was beautiful: even in the baggy blue jumpsuit they made her wear you could tell she had gifts. She had bright red hair, so exuberantly springy that it typically defied her attempts to pull it back and fell about her face, which was pale and comely, highlighting lush lips. A swath of sunny freckles ran just below her eyes, which were blue and bright. She was sweet and funny, and the handful of times we were together (and never, ever alone) the minutes burned away too quickly. She was such a lovely girl.

You Should Probably Keep In Mind, Though, That At This Point I Hadn’t Seen A Woman In Quite A While.

She was there because she had killed her father, a charge that she never denied. So far as I know, she never gave a reason for it. One of the guards told me that they’d asked her repeatedly if her father had abused her in any way–she said he hadn’t–and I could sense a little bit in the guard’s voice how much he wanted that this girl should say something–anything–that would make her not guilty of this terrible crime. I wasn’t the only one who thought she was special. I don’t know what ever became of her, but she’s still breaking my heart a little all these years later.

Some of my memories are funny. There was one kid who told everybody he was the half-brother of the lead singer of Warrant (he had said “brother” until someone pointed out that they didn’t share the same last name). I didn’t know the first thing about Warrant, and didn’t think he was the lead singer’s brother anyway, but along with others who couldn’t have believed it any more than I did, honored the fiction by mutual consensus. Sometime after I got out of Remann Hall, with Warrant now on my radar screen, I finally saw an image of the band on MTV (which played music videos at the time). I’ll be damned if that kid from juvie wasn’t the spitting image of now-deceased Warrant frontman Jani Lane.

Dude, Did We Do Time Together?

Among all the fading faces of that long-ago place, there remains only one to which I can still attach a name: a scrawny, twitchy half-wit who gained some notoriety throughout the wing through his unpredictable–and often disturbing–behavior. He was the juvenile delinquent iteration of the creepy paste-eating first-grader, and he would tell lies so fantastic that I don’t think he even intended that we should believe them. His bizarre behaviors were myriad, and had assumed the status of legend around the cell block, but the thing he was best-known for was sticking his dick through a small opening in the cell door and whacking off into the hallway. And that’s the reason I still remember that crazy fucker’s name and probably will until I die–his last name was Pettit.